Babel JS

Apr 25, 2015
• 1 min read
• Elliot Dickison

The future is here, and the final draft of the EMCAScript 6 spec is pending review! This future has actually been here for a while, but I haven’t been paying attention. Browsers have already started implementing ES6 features, and since the advent of the evergreen era it won’t take long for these changes to be available in the wild.

There is still the long tail of old browsers that may make production use of ES6 impractical for you. That’s where Babel JS comes in. If you can swing IE9+, Babel enables support of most ES6 features in all modern browsers. It’s part pre-processor, part polyfill that will transform new ES6 syntax into ES5 code and fill in any missing functionality like promises. Check it out at http://babeljs.io/.

Hey — I'm Elliot Dickison, a web developer currently working at Amazon.com in Seattle. I love Jesus, skiing, the web, and spending time outdoors with my awesome wife and daughter.